Every time I read about “ruined lives” in accounts of sex abuse I’m stopped in my tracks. Have all the survivors of clergy sex abuse and all other forms—including most recently and notoriously the Sandusky case—described their own lives as ‘ruined?’ In some cases, perhaps many, for sure, but the assumption that everyone who has endured abuse is burdened by a ‘ruined’ life is ill-founded and might well add more pain to the victim, or survivor, or, as I like to call myself in a very different context, the veteran.

I’m a veteran not of sex abuse but of Catholic family violence. By the time I was four years old my father was cracking me with great ardor on both sides of the head and face, and it was clear from the very beginning the punishment was in response to my failure to honor that ‘Christian moral order’ mandated if never explicitly articulated as judge—and jury–of the sole acceptable mode of behavior. This went on till I finally left home. Decades later I’d receive the all-too-obvious diagnosis of ADHD, but for as long as I lived in my father’s home I was possessed instead with satanic-inspired rotten kid syndrome (Yes I Am blessed with a sense of humor: the hi and lo-jinx kick in at around the 20 minute mark on here).

My father’s semi-exalted standing in the Roman Catholic Church was infinitely more important to him than the challenges faced by members of his family. My father appeared resplendent on the altar every weekend of my childhood in some capacity; his life blessed and lauded by parish priests and bishops alike. My mother talked even more profligately and even faster than I did, but her inability to self-advocate resulted eventually in electro-shock treatments and death by starvation. I chose to get knocked on my ass if that was the price of climbing back upright to witness to my own human experience and convictions. So be it.

Years later I made a decent living teaching and writing about the astonishing ways that an unseen invisible religious force could shape human consciousness and behavior. I wonder sometimes if I’m alone–working in a Catholic studies-related vocation—in knowing from this violent dimension of personal religious experience, for violence was in fact an integral component of the religion I was born with. Only since my father’s death last autumn have some relatives on my mother’s side come forward to opine: It’s a miracle you survived. I’m not yet certain how I feel about that.

But this was fifteen years after my autistic son was born. Following a brief period of self-pity shortly after Charlie’s diagnosis, it began to dawn on me that I’d been through an analogous experience as a kid—seeing the world blow up around me for no apparent reason or conscious intention of my own–that might prove of some value as we walk with Charlie toward his own achievement of self-advocacy. And so it has been; you just never know whence this journey together tends!

I do believe my life was profoundly altered not ruined by fifteen years of abusive religious violence. It’s true I have endured a lifetime of nightmares of a corpulent, pink-faced individual kneeling on my chest til I wake up silently screaming for breath. Far more troubling is the pain I caused myself, and others in subsequent years. For that I alone am responsible. So I’m a veteran, I’m responsible and my life was profoundly altered but not ruined via fifteen years of Catholic family violence, which differs from other forms of violence for being validated theologically. That’s why when I hear ‘natural law,’ I immediately lapse from the rhetorical style favored in refined, polite Catholic discourse.

Natural law is the official ideology of the Christian moral order the bishops would like to see enshrined as the foundation of U.S. public policy. It is also the ideology of cover-up and intellectual dishonesty: the bishops won’t even acknowledge natural law as uniquely their ideology, claiming instead it is the objective truth of the universe and woe unto those who do seek to evade its well-ordered logics. Since my life was altered not ruined, I’m here to witness to the collateral damage in human lives—and the ongoing violence committed against intellectual honesty—this Catholic-industrial complex wrought. We advocate a preferential option against its revival.

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3 responses to “Natural Law It Ain’t”

Wow. I am Catholic and was raised by Catholic parents and I have never heard of Catholic family violence, and I have never, ever heard of violence against a child theoretically backed up by the Church. I really, really question this theory.

This is a brilliant explanation of the violence that so many of us endured under the guise of “parental infallibility.” Far too many of us are also veterans of the Catholic Church, because the Church and the family were inextricably woven. The Church defined itself as our family, with the Pope explicitly called “the Holy Father.” The nuns taught us, from kindergarten on, that our biological fathers were the surrogates for God, chosen for us *by* God, and that we must obey our father’s dicta, and accept our father’s judgments, as those of God’s.

This was wonderful if your father was a non-violent, understanding, and fair font of loving kindness. If your father had chemical problems, such as alcoholism, and any sort of demon from his own upbringing, it was simply a license f- nay, a religious command – for him to act those out on the children that he was instructed to instruct. Belts, fists, blows with hands or frying pans or pieces of wood – well, at least they made good sprinters out of us. Those who could run fastest were labelled the intransigent trouble-makers. Those who quietly hid could be overlooked. But when you finally stood up and fought back – well, then you were a lost soul, one that had proven you had chosen Satan over Christ.

It wasn’t until I read Alice Miller’s “Drama of the Gifted Child” that I saw how damaged and even pitiable the violent, authoritarian parents were. It also confirmed the mental construct that I had of the Church as an authoritarian structure, based on impoverishing its adherents and brutalizing its weakest members. The events revealed over the past thirty of the systematic abuse of women and children by the Church in every country have only confirmed that mental construction.

The key that you have not yet discussed is the Church’s financial corruption. It is not for nothing that the Pope sits on a throne made of solid gold. The Papal Throne is the literal metaphor for the billions that the Vatican has collected and has kept for the past 10 centuries. While their communicants in diocese all across the world suffer, starve, and lose their schools and churches, the Pope and his entourage make sure that they are ever richer, in their self-contained country. They made deals with Mussolini for protection back in the 1920s. What is the rest of their history of consorting with monsters, while their own believers are sent to camps, or exterminated through starvation? The Irish may be the most representative, but they are by no means the only. Even now, narcoterrorists are claiming that they have dispensation from God to ply their trade at the point of the AK-47. The Church is finding its most fervent fields in the Southern Hemisphere, because that is where the population is least educated, and therefore the most susceptible.

You made it out alive, but the concept of “vocation,” so drumbeaten into every Catholic schoolchild, still reverberates in you. Now, though, you vocation consists of two things that inform each other: your son, and your survivor’s testimony.

I cannot wait to read more of the book of which this is so obviously the seed.

Thanks for writing Joanne and I know what you mean. When I was growing up nobody had ever heard of Catholic sexual abuse; now we’re looking at hundreds of thousands of incidents worldwide. That sorry story will be treated in history books for the next five hundred years. As to the analogous Catholic family violence I endured (a mentally ill perpetrator who knew Catholic moral order would erase any record of the violence), there is no history, despite the folkloric accounts of thousands of Catholic school veterans regarding their experiences. But you are quite right, Joanne, to question this on the theoretical level since it’s not yet established. On the experiential level I know quite well what I’m talking about.

On the Irish Waterfront: The Crusader, the Movie, and the Soul of the Port of New York by James T. Fisher (Cornell University Press)
Order the book from Amazon and Barnes and Noble; go here to order from Amazon UK. The book is also available on Kindle.